Breathlessness and Incoherence

I. Spotlight

This isn’t about RPGs but there’s been interesting conversations happening across the videogame sphere around Pokopia, the new Pokemon game.

Grayson Morley talks about the tone of breathlessness that so often suffuses the reviews of games: “I’m sorry, but Pokopia isn’t a meditation on a post-human world and the ravages of climate change. Pokopia is a tidying sim with some writing that asserts a few things. Its central experience is not meditation; it is pleasurable busywork. Pokopia is laundry day. Pokopia is power washing dressed in recognizable IP from your youth. I like Pokopia, but it ain’t deep.”

I’m definitely guilty of this at times as well. The big danger, for me, is when people forget to talk about the actual thing at least a little, skipping straight into exploring the personal or the political. You’ll know you did it wrong when anyone who picks up the game after reading your words goes, “wait, they were talking about this???”. This happened to me with Alan Wake 2 where I had heard lots about it and then when I was playing, I was annoyed that people failed to mention this game was mainly about shooting.

In another conversation started, Jake Steinberg writes about the “loremaster” drawing on Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation: “This is what it means, now, to “understand” a game. Because once a text becomes something to be cataloged, there is no longer any room to encounter it. Only to extract from it. The game stops being a place you move through and becomes a container of information to be emptied.”

I do think about this a lot. It’s natural to enjoy the accumulation of information, of pattern-making, even cataloguing. It can be so powerful, so constructive to engage with unknowns, to dream about possibilities, to wrestle with contradictions. But when cataloguing becomes the ultimate goal, a method to end the pesky speculation, the fun is lost. Now there’s only the competition to see who’s the most encyclopaedic.

II. Media of the Week

Mike Martens talks about how to layout RPG books by stealing ideas from elsewhere. A nice, solid introduction.

On Yes Indie’d, I spoke to Zach Cox about the journey with Soul Muppet Publishing and how Orbital Blues became big enough for its own crowdfunding event. (Apologies for the messiness of the edit.)
I also released a huge talkback episode for the Rascal Reading Club where Lin Codega, Luke Jordan, and I talk more about Apocalypse World.

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If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

Articles, Essays

Vincent Baker writes about how deciding who picks the outcome affects design and play in PbtA games: “By having you, the attacker, choose the outcome options, the game puts it forward that when you inflict terrible harm, that’s a choice that your character makes — to concentrate fire, for instance — not a choice that your target makes, to expose themself to your attack somehow.”
Kieron Gillen takes the players’ oaths in Mythic Bastionland and turns them into a GM formula with some cool anecdotes: “Honour The Seers
Your seers are the dice. Your seers are the spark tables. Your seers are the enigmatic sentences of the game. Do not consult them idly. When you consult them, honour the results. What the seers have told you is as real as anything else.”
Jay Dragon launches a series of design diaries about Seven Part Pact: “I was struggling with the stress and pressure the game was creating in its players — it was fun, but it was also overwhelming, and I didn’t know how to liberate it from that feeling. Vincent Baker pointed out that the game wasn’t just about a great quantity of information, but it was also about luxuriating in that information.”
I think writing about struggling with/having a bad time with a game is hard to do. People do it all the time, but usually badly. But I enjoyed this piece on the Usual Tongues blog (about a game I’m playing right now): “I ran five sessions of Luke Gearing’s Gradient Descent last year, and they kind of sucked. It’s a celebrated module and I’m a decent referee, so what gives?”
Sam Dunnewold writes a dozen-ish questions for designing your games: “Who is your game for? This is not an abstract question. Name the people you want to play your game with. What choice about whatever problem currently has you stumped would most delight them?”
One of the OSR’s semi-recurring debates played out again over the last few weeks. Snow wrote a manifesto of sorts about the value of incoherence and the downside of bullet points.
- Sam Sorenson wrote an apologia for plain text paragraphs, arguing they’re easier to read and remember.
Pointless Monuments writes “60 systems and 600 sessions. 3 years in the life of a TTRPG meetup.“

Misc

The TTRPG for trans rights bundle for Idaho is now accepting submissions.
By Night Studios goes fishing for whales with new Vampire larps where tickets (including stay, to be clear) go up to $8000.

V. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

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This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

Trail of Cthulhu megabundle: The core books plus all supplements, with some of their most well-received scenarios from designers like Graham Walsmley and Jason Morningstar.
Deadball, a quick playing baseball dice game, great fun for fans of RPGs and baseball.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.